Monday, May 07, 2012

Early Days at Sing Sing, 1: Two Visitors from France

LOWER HUDSON VALLEY

Today, the average new book has a shelf
life somewhere between milk and yogurt. Yet a book published in 1835 continues
to command the attention of scholars, politicians, students of government and
the reading public.

Democracy
in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, remains a
penetrating and astute picture of American politics, manners and morals 177
years ago. Unfortunately, the greatness of Tocqueville's book overshadows the earlier
joint report on the penitentiary systems of the United
States largely written by his companion on their joint
trip to America.

Tocqueville, 26, an assistant magistrate
at the law court of Versailles, would later briefly be France's minister of foreign
affairs. He and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, 29, also a magistrate, arrived
in the United States
early in May of 1831.

Commissioned by the French Minister of the
Interior, they came to study American penitentiaries. Their interest in prisons
was actually a cover for a private purpose: to understand the social and
political institutions of the young republic.

In July of 1830, Charles X, the last
Bourbon king of France,
was overthrown in a revolution that installed Louis Philippe, initially called
the ‘Citizen King." Tocqueville and Beaumont were unhappy with the new
king and wanted an excuse to leave the country. Prison reform was in the air,
so they proposed to study American prisons. French government officials
demanded they make the trip at their own expense.

Much of the more than nine months the two
spent in the United States
was devoted to other matters, but they carried out their prison investigations
faithfully. Despite their subordinate status in the French bureaucracy, they
were lionized everywhere they went in America--much to their surprise and
delight.

They reached Newport,
R.I., on May 9, 1831, after a 37-day voyage
from Le Havre. With
a crew of 18, their ship carried 165 passengers, a cow, and a donkey. Both
Frenchmen worked hard to improve their knowledge of English by conversing with
as many English-speaking passengers as they could.

The food on board having almost run out,
the enterprising duo convinced the captain to put them ashore at Newport. From there they
caught a steamboat for New York City.
Arriving the next day, they found lodging in a boarding house at 66 Broadway,
diagonally across from TrinityChurch.

The Mercantile
Advertiser and New York Evening Post
of May 11, 1831, both carried the following notice of their arrival and
predicted they would find Amer­ican prison authorities cooperative.

"We understand that two magistrates, Messrs. de Beaumont and de
Tonqueville, [sic] have arrived in the ship Havre, sent by order of the
Ministry of the Interior, to examine the various prisons in our country, and
make a report on their return to France.

“The
French government have it in contemplation to improve their Penitentiary
system, and take this means of obtaining all proper information. In our
country, we have no doubt that every facility will be extended to the gentlemen
who have arrived."

A New York
Welcome

They were royally entertained and shown some of the city's places
of detention. The House of Refuge for Delinquent Minors, housed in the old
arsenal near the northwest corner of what is now MadisonSquarePark,
was of interest to them because a similar institution along the same
architectural plan was being constructed in Melun, a suburb of Paris.

Traveling in five carriages, the party
next visited the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane, located in remote farmlands
at what would become the ColumbiaUniversity campus at 116th Street and
Broadway in 1894.

On the return trip, the official party
stopped at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum on the south side of 50th Street between Fourth and Fifth
avenues. Another stop was at the Bellevue Almshouse for the care of the poor
and indigent on First Avenue
between 27th and 28th streets. Its infirmary ward would later grow into the
oldest public hospital in America.

Their tour ended with a visit to a city
prison holding 400 inmates on Blackwell's Island in the East River (later
called Welfare Island and now Roosevelt Island).

After two hectic weeks, the two young
Frenchmen were looking forward to escaping from the city. "You can have no
conception of the activity of our existence," Beaumont wrote to his father. "We
haven't time to breathe. It's a creeping barrage of agreeable invitations,
useful occupations, official presentations, etc., etc."

The state prison at the village of Sing Sing
in Westchester was the largest in the United States. Tocqueville and
Beaumont decided to make it the first institution studied on their trip.

Thanks to their nine-day visit and close
examination of both the prison and the village, we have a clearer picture of
this part of Westchester in the 1830s. [The
village changed its name to Ossining in 1901
to distinguish itself from the prison.]

The Bad Old Days

The English colonists of America
brought with them the harsh 17th and 18th century criminal code practiced in England and Scotland. Under that rigorous system,
many offenses were punishable by death--the easiest way for a society to get
rid of its objectionable criminals.

In the words of historian Edward Channing,
“Lesser offenders were treated with pitiless publicity combined with bodily
pain--flogging, mutilation and branding or public exposure to the taunts and
missiles of the populace.”

The latter took place in the stocks--a
heavy timber frame with holes for confining the ankles and sometimes the
wrists. Little concern was expressed for the rehabilitation or reformation of
criminals.

There simply was no prison problem. The
dead needed no confinement. Those who were punished harshly were returned to
society maimed and bruised--but alive. There was no middle ground. In the
mother country, debtors and those awaiting trial were held in local jails.

In the colonies, such practices became
unpopular. Religious freedom gave rise to calls for changes in the system.

Prison Reform Begins

One religious group in particular--members of the Society of
Friends, known as "Quakers"--opposed the harsh punishments of the
mother country. With a frontier requiring settlement and exploitation, the growing
feeling was that human resources were too scarce and too valuable to waste.

The American Revolution accelerated the
growth of these sentiments. With freedom from Britain came a reduction in the
number of capital offenses. Punishment for lesser offenses veered away from the
infliction of pain and humiliation to imprisonment.

Results, however, were not what were
expected. Prisoners of all ages, sexes, colors or criminal experience were
incarcerated together in large, unventilated, unclean and unhealthful rooms.
The overcrowded pestilential prisons soon became veritable training schools of
crime and vice.

One logical solution was detention in
individual cells, a movement begun by Quakers in Pennsylvania. Rather than kill or punish
criminals, they argued it was a Christian duty to reform them. They believed strict
solitary confinement, night and day, would cause prisoners to repent. This new
kind of prison was called a "penitentiary," or house of penitence.

The Auburn System

In 1821, New YorkState decided to test the penitentiary theory on 80
convicts at the recently constructed Auburn Prison in the Finger
Lakes region. It soon became obvious that solitary confinement
broke the health and the spirit of prisoners. Within three years, so many had
died or became ill or insane the governor pardoned the survivors.

Penology
was still an infant science, but clearly it was better to employ convicts at
useful labor. Accordingly, during the day prisoners at Auburn were brought together in shops to work
in absolute silence with others at various tasks.

To maintain their isolation, inmates were
not allowed to talk or communicate in any way. The whip enforced this rule;
welts on a prisoner's body left by a whipping were called "stripes."
The practice of solitary confinement by night and group work by day--always in
silence--became known as the Auburn system.

The Pennsylvania
System

By contrast, the principle of total solitary confinement was
maintained in Pennsylvania,
but with a significant difference: Inmates were provided with work in their
cells, each of which had a small, walled backyard where individual exercise
could be taken.

Opened in 1829, the Eastern State
Penitentiary in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia
epitomized the Pennsylvania
system of "solitude and labor," and carried the principle of
isolation to an extreme.

To attend a religious service or lecture,
at a signal each convict in his cell placed a pillowcase over his head and
stood by the cell door. Keepers then unlocked the doors; the convicts stepped
out and turned. With bodies pressed close together and one hand on the shoulder
of the man in front, they were led single file into the auditorium. The
peculiar shuffling gait required in this maneuver was called the “lockstep."

The auditorium was constructed with
enclosed seats and a small opening so each inmate in the audience could see only
the stage. After the event, the inmates donned their pillowcases again and locksteppd
their way back to their cells.

In effect, America
had two competing philosophies and two systems of imprisonment: the Auburn
system and the Pennsylvania
system.

On May 28, 1831, Tocqueville wrote to Abbé
Lesueur, his former tutor in France:

"We
are going tomorrow to Sing-Sing, a village ten leagues from New
York and situated on the North River.
We shall stay there a week to study the discipline of a vast penitentiary
system recently built there.

“What
we have seen up to now suffices to prove to us that prisons attract general
attention here and that in several respects they are much better than those of France.

“We
are delighted to go to Sing-Sing. It is impossible to imagine anything more
beautiful than the North or Hudson River. The
great width of the stream, the admirable richness of the north bank and the
steep mountains which border its eastern margins make it one of the most
admirable sights in the world."

On this hopeful note we take leave of our
two intrepid visitors until Part Two.